“Danke schon,”Major Kapellmeister said when he returned card and pen. “For now, as you rightly point out, we are allies, and you have been treated as such thus far. Is this not so?” Jones had to nod, as did Bagnall and Embry. The journey across German ally Finland, Sweden (neutral but ever so polite to German wishes), and German-held Norway had been fast, efficient, and as pleasant as such a journey could be in times of hardship.
As Kapellmeister disposed of the card, Bagnall had a vision of copies of it making journeys of their own, to every hamlet where Nazi soldiers and Nazi bureaucrats stood guard. If Jerome Jones ever stepped off the straight and narrow anywhere theReich held sway, he was in trouble.
Once the parole was in his hands and in his precious file box, though, the major went from testy to affable. “You are free now to board the freighterHarald Hardrada. You are fortunate, in fact. Loading of the ship is nearly complete, and soon it will sail for Dover.”
“Been a long time since we’ve seen Dover,” Bagnall said. Then he asked, “Do the Lizards make a habit of shooting up ships bound for England? They haven’t got a formal cease-fire with us, after all.”
Kapellmeister shook his head. “It is not so. The informal truce they have with England appears to prevent them from doing this.”
The three Englishmen left his office and walked down to the dock where theHarald Hardrada lay berthed. The docks smelled of salt and fish and coal smoke. German guards stood at the base of the gangplank. One of them ran back to Kapellmeister to check whether the RAF men were to be allowed aboard. He came back waving his hand, and the rest of the guards stood aside. The inefficiency the Germans showed there made Bagnall feel better about the world.
He had to share with his comrades a cabin so small it lacked only a coat of red paint to double as a telephone box, but that didn’t bother him. After so long away from England, he would cheerfully have hung himself on a hatrack to get home.
That didn’t mean he wanted to spend much time in the cabin, though. He went back out on deck as soon as he’d pitched his meager belongings on a bunk. Uniformed Germans were rolling small, sealed metal drums up the gangplank. When the first one got to theHarald Hardrada, one of the soldiers tipped it onto its flat end. It was neatly stenciled,NORSK HYDRO, VEMORK.
“What’s in there?” Bagnall asked, pointing. By now, his German was fluent enough that, for a few words or a few sentences at a time, he could be mistaken for a native speaker, though not one from his listener’s home region, whatever that happened to be.
The fellow in the coal-scuttle helmet grinned at him. “Water,” he answered.
“If you don’t want to tell me, then just don’t say,” Bagnall grumbled. The German laughed at him and set the next barrel, identically stenciled, on its end beside the first. Irked, Bagnall stomped away, his feet clanging on the steel plates of the deck. The Nazi, damn him, laughed louder.
He and his comrades stowed away the barrels somewhere down in the cargo hold, where Bagnall didn’t have to look at them. He told the story to Embry and Jones, both of whom chaffed him without mercy for letting a German get the better of him.
Thick, black coal smoke poured from the stack of theHarald Hardrada as it pulled out of Kristiansand harbor for the journey across the North Sea to England. Even if Bagnall was going home, it was a voyage he could have done without. He’d never been airsick, not in the worst evasive maneuvers, but the continual pounding of big waves against the freighter’s hull sent him springing for the rail more than once. His comrades didn’t twit him for that. They were right there beside him. So were some of the sailors. That made him feel. If not better, at least more resigned to his fate: misery loves company had a lot of truth to it.
Lizard jets flew over the freighter a couple of times, so high that their vapor trails were easier to see than the aircraft themselves. TheHarald Hardrada had ack-ack guns mounted at bow and stern. Along with everyone else aboard, Bagnall knew they were essentially useless against Lizard planes. But the Lizards did not come down for a closer look or on a strafing run. Cease-fires, formal and otherwise, held.
Bagnall had spied several cloudbanks off to the west, identifying each in turn as England: he was seeing with a landlubber’s eye, and one half blinded by hope. Before long, the clouds would shift and destroy his illusion. Then at last he caught sight of something out there that did not move or dissolve.
“Yes, that is the English coast,” a sailor answered when he asked.
“It’s beautiful,” Bagnall said. The Estonian coast had gained beauty because he was sailing away from it. This one did so because he was approaching. Actually, the two landscapes looked pretty much alike: low, flat land slowly rising up from a sullen sea.
Then, off in the distance, he spotted the towers of Dover Castle, right down by the ocean. That made the homecoming feel real in a way it hadn’t before. He turned to Embry and Jones, who stood beside him. “I wonder if Daphne and Sylvia are still at the White Horse Inn.”
“Can but hope,” Ken Embry said.
“Amen,” Jones echoed. “Would be nice to have a lady friend who wouldn’t just as soon shoot you down as look at you, let alone sleep with you.” His sigh was full of nostalgia. “I remember there are women like that, though it’s been so long I’m beginning to forget”
A tug came out to help nudge theHarald Hardrada up against a pier in a surprisingly crowded harbor. As soon as she’d been made fast in her berth with lines fore and aft, as soon as the gangplank snaked across to the dock, a horde of tweedy Englishmen with the unmistakable look of boffins swarmed aboard at a dead run and besieged every uniformed German they could find with a single question, sometimes in English, sometimes in German:
“Where is it?”
“Where’s what?” Bagnall asked one of the men.
Hearing an undoubtedly British voice, the fellow answered without hesitation: “Why, the water, of course.”
Bagnall scratched his head.
One of the cooks ladled soup into David Nussboym’s bowl. He sank the ladle all the way down to the bottom of the big iron pot. It came out full of cabbage leaves and bits of fish. The ration loaf he handed Nussboym was full weight or even a trifle over. It was still black bread, coarse and hard to chew, but it was warm from the oven and smelled good. His tea was made from local roots and leaves and berries, but the glass the cook gave him had plenty of sugar, so it was palatable enough.
And he had plenty of room in which to eat. Clerks and interpreters and other politicals got fed ahead of the common run ofzek. Nussboym recalled with distaste the mob scenes in which he’d had to defend with his elbows the space in which he was sitting, and recalled a couple of times when he’d been elbowed off a bench and onto the planks of the floor.
He dug in. With every mouthful of soup, well-being flowed through him. It was almost as if he could feel himself being nourished. He sipped at his tea, savoring every morsel of dissolved sugar that flowed over his tongue. When your belly was full, life looked good-for a while.
“Nu,David Aronovich, how do you like talking with the Lizards?” asked Moisei Apfelbaum, Colonel Skriabin’s chief clerk. He spoke in Yiddish to Nussboym but used his name and patronymic anyhow, which would have been an affectation anywhere in the USSR but seemed particularly absurd in thegulag, where patronymics fell by the wayside even in Russian.
Nevertheless, Nussboym imitated his style: “Compared to freedom, Moisei Solomonovich, it is not so much. Compared to chopping logs in the woods-” He did not go on. He did not have to go on.
Apfelbaum nodded. He was a skinny little middle-aged fellow, with eyes that looked enormous behind steel-rimmed spectacles. “Freedom you do not need to worry about, not here. Thegulag has worse things than logging, believe me. A man could be unlucky enough to dig a canal. One can be unlucky, as I say, or one can be clever. Good to be clever, don’t you think?”